Library Staff News

a. Melvyl Transition Team

Ann Jensen and Debra Bartling will be leaving the Melvyl Transition Team and returning full time to their positions at UC Berkeley; Felicia Poe will be taking on new responsibilities.

Ann joined the Melvyl-T project in April 2001 and was the leader of the Melvyl Transition Services Team until May 1, when she began a part-time schedule, sharing time at CDL with her duties as head of the Astronomy/Math/Stat Library at Berkeley.  Now, her time at CDL will come to an end on July 31.  We are enormously grateful for Ann’s leadership in this challenging process of creating the interface for Melvyl-T, taking into consideration the diversity of experience and behavior of Melvyl’s many users.  Ann’s deep understanding of researchers’ needs and behaviors have been invaluable.

On May 1, Felicia Poe of the CDL became the leader of the Services Team after working closely with Ann and other members of the Team since her arrival at CDL, and will continue in a key role watching out for user services in the Melvyl-T environment as the future unfolds.

We were extremely lucky to be able to borrow Debra from the Earthquake Engineering Research Center at Berkeley half-time for a year, and that year also ends July 31.  We have been the beneficiaries of her superior technical skills and adventurous spirit.  Among her many contributions, she has been the technical lead in setting CDL up with job scheduler software which will be used for loading input files from our contributors, as well as the FTP Virtual Host arrangement for receiving all of our contributor’s files. She has also played a major role in documenting our understanding of the Aleph software and her passionate commitment to quality control has been invaluable in tracking the many changes to this version of the software.